Editor's Log
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This page provides a day-by-day log of activity on this site, plus announcements of new titles as they are released. See also the To Do list for an idea of where this project is headed.
2004-04-09
Added Scott's The Antiquary. Illustrated.
2004-04-03
Added Scott's Black Dwarf.
2004-03-31
Added Scott's Kenilworth.
2004-03-27
Still working on Scott. I finished Waverley, and was rather pleased with the result. I next marked up Guy Mannering and found that even more pleasing. About a week ago, I started on Ivanhoe, which I expected to be somewhat simpler, since it has no illustrations, but found all sorts of complications with the source plain text file. However, after quite a lot of work, I've beaten it into shape and finished a few moments ago. First I had to sort out all the quotations -- an epigraph for each chapter, and many verse quotations throughout the text. None of these were identified in the source (by the usual indentation) so mostly I had to compare with a print edition to find them all. Second, there's quite a lot of latin, and bits of French, which should be italicised but wasn't -- they were quoted instead. Fixed all those. (I think.) Third, there were embedded notes and endnotes, which I've merged into footnotes for each chapter. Plus the usual fixes.
2004-03-19
Sorry about that! This is not meant to be a monthly log, I've just been very busy with other things (work). But there has been activity:
First, you'll notice that the site has been redesigned somewhat, and I'd be happy to receive feedback on the change.
Also, I've added around 20 new books -- all by Anthony Trollope.
Finally, I've just started work on Sir Walter Scott. I shouldn't have started with "Waverley", because the edition I'm working from is rather complex!
2004-02-23
Just for a change, I'm actually marking up some books! Currently working on Trollope. Last night I did all the Barchester series. Just now I completed the Autobiography.
2004-02-22
From the log dates, you'd think there'd been a long hiatus in activity — almost a month. Well, you'd be half right. There have been a number of other things going on recently that have kept me away from ebooks — the biannual VALA conference for one, plus the usual pre-semester work activities. But I have managed a few things. Principally, you'll notice a slightly improved (I hope!) new look for the site web pages, which now look better in IE6, now that I've solved a long-standing bug in the style sheet (the word "gray" was spelt "grey"!)
Also, the actual ebooks are undergoing a make-over: each title page will now sport the imprint "eBooks@Adelaide", and the document info ("title verso") at the end of the title page will be improved, with clearer statements and links to a "complete" version and MARC record for libraries to download.
The "complete" version will be of use to anyone wanting to print the ebook, because the style sheet has been enhanced for printing.
Of course, updating all the ebooks to this new standard is going to take some time — quite a lot of time actually.
2004-01-26
Added Stanley's How I found Livingstone. Also (yesterday) The War in the Air by H.G. Wells, which had far too many typos/scanning errors (scannos?), but ... I hope is pretty good now.
In both cases, I was testing changes I've made to the generating scripts.
Also, I've worked some more on the style sheet. This is now generated from the detailed explanation, which is moderately cool.
Oh, and the conversion and repairs mentioned below are essentially done, at least in terms of bulk processing. There seem to be endless opportunities for tweaking and polishng individual books.
2004-01-20
I've received a contribution from someone, in the form of books by Burckhardt and Richard Burton. All contain copious fragments of arabic, some hebrew and some greek, so these have prompted an excursion into encoding. I've learned a lot about conversion of encodings in the last few days. The upshot is that these look like a good case for using UTF-8. Fortunately, tidy makes this easy: tidy --input-encoding latin1 --output-encoding utf8.
The first result is available now: Burckhardt's Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.
2004-01-17
The plot, as they say, thickens. In this case, like a soup with too much lentil. I found that IE6 also screws up if the DOCTYPE specifies (x)HTML Transitional. I thought about all these "standards" problems for a while, and in the end I've decided to eschew XHTML in favour of HTML 4.01 Strict. The benefits of this decision are: (1) the ebooks will display as I intended in IE6 as well as Mozilla (and even OK in NS4); (2) they'll still display OK in Lynx and (presumably) older browsers (I don't have any, but its a reasonable assumption); (3) they can be easily converted to XHTML using tidy, without errors, since we're sepcifying strict. On the other hand, if I stuck with XHTML, I'd be forever removing the declaration, which tidy insists on adding even when you tell it not to. And no dount I'd periodically forget to do that. And what benefit does anyone gain from using XHTML over HTML anyway, aside from being able to claim XML "status" for their project? To hell with it, I say.
So, once I'd made that decision, I went ahead and converted ALL the ebooks -- the whole 700 -- to HTML 4.01 Strict. Also made sure each one has a titlepage DIV so they look nice. Now I'm cleaning up the last 60 or so with odd things in the titlepage.
Once I've finished all that, I intend to go back and make sure all ebooks have the correct set of meta tags. Among other things, I want to make sure they all have a dc:creator in "canonical" form: "lastname, firstnames, dates". And once I've finished that, I'll be able to generate author & title lists directly from the metadata in the books themselves. In theory.
2004-01-16
Ugh! That was way too exciting. Having decided that it was now time to update all pages to xhtml, and put all the things in place for that, and having started converting files, I now find that Internet Explorer 6 has a BUG! (Well, of course! Duh!) If the page begins with an xml declaration (which tidy always adds, and has no means of not adding), then IE6 will not display the page correctly -- it goes into a "quirks" mode, which among other things ignores various CSS tricks. So now I now why my pages always looked poor in IE6. The good news is that, it seems, all browsers are happy if the xml decl is NOT present; and IE6 will do a much better job (although still imperfect, it seems) if the xml decl is removed, so long as the page has a DOCTYPE.
So now I need to: (1) remove the xml decl. from all the pages I've just updated (aargh!); and (2) make sure all pages have a DOCTYPE. Shouldn't take more than a week. (Sigh!)
But the end result will be that the ebooks look MUCH better in IE6 (as they do in Mozilla), so the effort is worth it.
2004-01-15
If some of the books look a little strange right now (especially in the title page) it's because I'm in the process of upgrading the older ebooks to match the current standard (which is evolving as I go!) I hope that the title pages of all ebooks will soon look much improved -- but there are over 300 ebooks in need of updating, so this process is taking a bit longer than I'd like. The work is tedious in the extreme, but, once started, I guess I have to proceed through to the end. I have, of course, written perl scripts to assist, but I still find I need to manually edit almost all files.
The work is proceeding more or less alphabetically by author, and I'm currently up to "D", if you want to check progress.
2004-01-08
The more you know, the more complex things can become, sometimes. Playing with the style sheet led me into some interesting areas. The existing style sheet does not prescribe any particular font or font size, using the browser's default for body text. This is at the philosophical heart of the web books — the user is best placed to decide what font best suits them, and a key advantage of web books over print is that the user can make that choice.
However, the style sheet does specify Arial as the font to use for headings and "footer" content. I read somewhere that Microsoft actually developed two fonts, Verdana (sans-serif) and Georgia (serif) specifically for use on screen, and therefore I started thinking, maybe I should use Verdana instead of Arial. Now, I just last night discovered something interesting about sans-serif fonts and Microsoft's Clear-Type, which is used for font smoothing on LCD screens (e.g. my laptop): if you turn on clear-type font smoothing, then Arial looks horrible and Verdana looks great. But if you turn off clear-type font smoothing, or you have a regular CRT monitor (which doesn't/cannot use clear-type) then Arial looks good and Verdana looks bad.
So, the upshot is, that since I don't know whether a user has an LCD screen or not, and indeed whether they've discovered the clear-type option or not, then I'd best not specify any font at all, and accordingly I've removed any reference to Arial from the style-sheet. (But not retrospectively, yet.)
A further problems arises because of differences between Mozilla (my browser of choice) and IE. How can I put this? IE is hopeless! It offers only the most limited selection of font options, and no way to set a font size, other than "smaller", "larger" etc. When I view the site pages (e.g. this one) in IE, the font size is either a little too large, or miniscule. And there's no way to change that! (Actually, under Accessibilty options, you can exercise a little more control. But its a struggle.) Compared to the control offered in Mozilla, IE is just pathetic.
2004-01-07
I've been working on improvements to the style sheet, to do with printing. Basically, this is directed at printing, specifically for the single-file version of books, and will provide a page break between chapters etc. This will be handy if anyone should actually want to print out an entire book. It's not perfected yet, and the new style sheet is not yet applied to all the existing books. And older works (i.e. those I marked up some time ago) don't all have a single-file version of the book. So quite a lot of retro work to do here.
Speaking of retro, I took a look at Isaac Walton's Complete Angler, which was maybe the first book I marked up, way back in 1988. Yikes! It's horrible, compared to today's markup standard. I guess I'll redo that sometime, but it is interesting to compare my markup then (very basic) with now.
2003
The log for 2003 is now archived.
